


We're So Miserable and Stunning

by potatochul (ai_hao)



Category: Super Junior
Genre: Author: Hao, M/M, Underage Drinking, and similar misbehavior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 09:51:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7263109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ai_hao/pseuds/potatochul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're not exactly rivals but they're definitely not friends, just a couple of teenage miscreants whose paths happen to cross. High school not-really-AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We're So Miserable and Stunning

“Hey, fuckface.”

Kim Heechul puts down the book he was taking out of his locker and looks at the person addressing him. Jeon Younghoon from the construction school is leaning against the locker next to his, a sour expression on his pink fuzz-speckled face.

“What do you want, dickwad?” Heechul asks, making a point of looking down at Younghoon. They’re in the same grade, so they’re probably the same age, but Younghoon’s still short. He’s buff, true, but Heechul calls that overcompensation.

Younghoon straightens his back a little. “You know my Im Junho wants to pick a fight with your Song Hyunwoo?” Translation: Junho has a crush on Hyunwoo. They might be from different groups, but gay speaks the same language everywhere. It was Heechul’s seniors who made it up, of course.

“Yeah. Obviously.” This is the first Heechul has heard of it, but he’d lose face if he admitted to paying that little attention to his favorite junior and likely successor as leader of his gang of queers. “Even I can tell how pissed off Junho is. Still not a good enough excuse for coming over here and breathing my air.”

“He asked me to talk to you about it. Says he doesn’t want it to become a big problem between our groups.”

Heechul scoffs. “What, he can’t put on his big boy panties and deal with his own shit? Lucky for you, I’m feeling nice today. Let’s—” He stops, seeing a teacher walking down the hall out of the corner of his eye, and clears his throat.

The teacher walks over, glaring at both of them and clicking his tongue. “Kim Heechul. Didn’t I tell you last week that your hair is not allowed to touch your ears?” He grabs a lock of Heechul’s hair and tugs on it. Heechul yelps. “Don’t make me send you home. You’re graduating soon, don’t go getting in trouble and ruining that now. And you, Younghoon, should not need to be reminded that male students are to come to school clean shaven.” The teacher glances between the two of them. “Couple of miscreants. Don’t tell me you’re friends now. This school is enough of a disciplinary nightmare—” A commotion further down the hall catches the teacher’s attention—a third year has a scrawny first year off his feet and shoved up against the lockers. “Stop! Put him down!” the teacher yells, storming down the hallway with his ruler gripped tight like a weapon.

As the teacher drags the older kid off for a caning, Heechul lowers his voice and says to Younghoon, “Let’s talk about this later. I’ll meet you behind the woodshop room after school.”

“Fine. See you then, asshole.”

“Don’t be late, shithead.” Heechul stuffs his book into his backpack and walks away.

***

Younghoon wanders back into the school’s lumber storage area and finds a pile of pine planks to lean against, flipping his cell phone open and closed idly. He can’t believe he’s doing this. Not that his group is Heechul’s group’s enemy, even though they’ve got a long tradition of being assholes to each other just for the hell of it. They’ve got a kind of unspoken respect for each other, but Younghoon hasn’t heard of inter-group dating ever happening. It’s one of those unspoken rules. Besides, Younghoon’s group is clearly more popular, so dating one of the others would be a step down. But he felt bad that he hadn’t noticed anything before Junho asked him for help getting Hyunwoo to agree to this date like it was the most obvious thing in the world he liked him. Even _Heechul_ noticed it, dammit. So Younghoon thinks he owes Junho the favor—not that he has a choice at this point anyway.

The whir of power tools from inside the woodshop room gets louder for a second as Heechul opens the back door and strolls through. That’s what makes this spot the ideal meeting location passed down for years from one kid to the next for whatever secret shit needs to go down: there’s always a few people staying late to work on a project they’ve been slacking on, so it doesn’t look suspicious for you to be back here, but it’s noisy as hell, so there’s no danger of someone overhearing.

“There you are, buttmunch,” Younghoon says by way of greeting.

“Nice to see you too, cocknugget.” Heechul leans against a pile of maple across from Younghoon, glancing at his phone like he doesn’t want to be here. “So,” he says.

“So,” Younghoon repeats. Shit, why did he agree to do this? Now that it comes down to saying it, it’s a damn weird thing to ask.

“You got a little love note for me to pass on or something?” Heechul smirks. “Do you like me, check yes or no, heart Junho?”

“It’s worse.” Younghoon winces, but he knows he can’t keep stalling. “He wants to go on a double date. Says he saw it in a movie or some shit.”

“A double date with who?”

Younghoon raises his eyebrows in what he hopes is a meaningful way. He can’t make the words come out of his mouth.

“…Oh god.” Apparently it dawns on Heechul. “What kind of a fucking ridiculous idea—does he think I’m Hyunwoo’s dad and he needs to ask my permission?”

“Look, I know. He didn’t tell me before he asked Hyunwoo out, but now Hyunwoo thinks we already know and it was our idea—Junho’s an awkward kid, okay? But he’ll look bad if we don’t show up, and I don’t want to do that to him. Give him a break. You know how hard it is to find a date out here.”

“Maybe for you, pisspunch. _I’ve_ never had any trouble.” Heechul pulls out a compact mirror and fixes his hair. “Well,” he says, carefully moving a wayward strand of bangs, “being seen with you two steaming piles of dog shit won’t be great for my reputation, but I guess there’s nothing I can do. You’re paying, of course. Oppa doesn’t work for free.” He snaps the mirror shut and looks at Younghoon. “What time and where?”

“Tomorrow night, 5:30, outside that kalguksu place down the block. And I’m older than you, asswaffle.”

“Whatever, pigtits. See you there.”

***

Tomorrow night, 5:25, outside that kalguksu place down the block, Heechul waits. (After calling Hyunwoo and making sure Younghoon didn’t make this all up as a ploy to get in his pants, of course. Heechul wasn’t born yesterday. But nice senior that he is, he made sure to sound like he’d been planning this all along and was just checking in so that Hyunwoo would show up on time. It’s a fucking pathetic dating pool after all, he’s not going to ruin anyone’s chances.)

Heechul hates waiting. He especially hates getting dressed up for nothing. Maybe if he lived somewhere with an actual nightlife he wouldn’t mind, since he could just leave and go somewhere else—he’s heard that in Seoul there are even bars just for gay people, imagine that—but as it is, if they keep him waiting he’ll probably just go home.

“Hey, shitfarts!” Heechul looks up from his cell phone game; Younghoon is rounding the corner. 5:28, not bad. Plus one point for being on time, minus one for the terrible insult.

“That wasn’t even funny. Try a little harder, dickbrain.”

“At least I _have_ a brain.” Younghoon stands under the awning next to Heechul, facing the street, his arms crossed. Heechul sizes up his outfit—a T-shirt and jeans, shabby. (Younghoon thinks he’s being low-key and stealthy, unlike Heechul, who couldn’t be more obviously gay if he had it written in rainbow glitter on the front of his pink floral shirt.)

“Are those little fuckers really not here yet? I’m hungry.” Younghoon asks, checking his phone.

“Of course not. Kids these days, no respect for their elders. Back in my day, you had to show up an hour early to be sure you wouldn’t keep your seniors waiting! Do three 90-degree bows when they arrived! Kiss the ground they walked on!” That gets a weak courtesy laugh out of Younghoon, which dissipates the tension just a little.

A few more minutes pass. Heechul texts Hyunwoo, paces back and forth waiting for a response. After five minutes of nothing, he calls him, but it rings and rings until finally the voicemail message starts playing. Heechul hangs up. Younghoon tries calling Junho, with the same result. The clock ticks over to 5:40.

“Well, that’s it,” Heechul says, sticking his phone back in his bag. “I’ve never waited more than 10 minutes for a date, and I’ve got a reputation to keep up. See you around, chicken turd.”

“Shouldn’t we just eat since we’re already here?” Younghoon frowns. “I don’t feel like going home yet.”

Heechul glances in the window at what the other customers are eating. He shrugs. “Sure, whatever. Not like I’ve got anything better to do since I canceled my plans for those two shitrags.”

They order a big pot of clam kalguksu to share. Heechul pours himself a cup of cold barley tea, leaving Younghoon’s glass empty, and holds it up like he’s proposing a toast. “To graduating and getting the hell out of this sorry-ass town,” he says. The owner auntie glares at him for his language.

Younghoon fills his own glass with a mumble of annoyance and lifts it grudgingly. “And better Friday nights than this shit.” They clink their cups together and drain them, Heechul letting out an exaggerated hiss like he just downed a shot of hard liquor, loud enough that people at the other tables turn around and stare at them. Younghoon looks like he’s trying unsuccessfully to pretend they don’t know each other.

The owner brings out the steaming pot and sets it between the two of them, seemingly unsure how to react to these two delinquent but charming youngsters. (Well, one delinquent but charming, the other just delinquent. Though Heechul supposes Younghoon has a kind of grungy appeal, if you’re into that sort of thing.) Heechul gives her his best bad-boy smile, but the expression she makes back is just parental and disappointed. Unperturbed, he digs into the soup and immediately burns his mouth. Younghoon proceeds with more caution. The long hand-cut noodles tangle easily, so they keep inadvertently pulling on the strand the other one is eating.

“Look at this shit. It’s like the fucking Lady and the Tramp, and who am I with? A guy. What did I do in my past life to deserve this?” Heechul whines. Younghoon pulls a clam shell out of the bowl and uses it to flick broth at him.

Being a couple of growing youths, they’re more concerned with food than conversation. They slurp up the whole bowl about as fast as you’d expect, leaving a huge pile of clam shells precariously stacked on the empty kimchi dish. All that’s left is the bill, sitting quietly on the edge of the table. Heechul looks at Younghoon, eyebrows raised. Younghoon looks back. This staring contest goes on for several seconds. Finally, though, Younghoon pulls out his wallet and drops a few bills on the receipt. Heechul grins and mentally congratulates himself on being such a maneater.

The owner comes back to get the money, squints at the receipt, and frowns. “Hey, this is only half of your bill. What are you trying to pull?” She glowers down at Heechul.

“I—no—it’s his fault!” He points at Younghoon.

“No excuses, young man. What kind of adult are you going to grow up to be if you get into these habits now?”

Heechul digs his wallet out of his purse and hands her a 10,000 won bill without looking her in the eyes. He flips Younghoon his prettiest finger over the lip of the table as soon as she’s gone. Younghoon plays innocent. Heechul hates him a little bit but also gives him another point in the respect tally for not giving in to pressure.

They get their change and leave. Since their paths home go the same way for a few blocks, they walk back together. The sun is just beginning to set, refreshingly late after the long winter, and a few thin clouds leave pink trails across the sky.

As they walk by a small, run-down-looking convenience store, Younghoon pauses. “Want something to drink, shrimpdick? I know the guy who works here. He’ll hook us up.”

“Really?” Heechul lets himself sound a little impressed. “Yeah, OK. What the hell. Here.” He pulls a crumpled thousand-won bill out of his pocket and hands it over.

“I’ll be right back. Look out for cops, or whatever.” Younghoon runs inside, and Heechul does his best to keep watch. Not that it really matters as long as you’re not wearing your school uniform or some shit, but in theory he knows this is illegal.

A minute later, Younghoon comes back out, glancing up and down the block and clutching a brown paper bag. “Here, hide this, quick,” he says, holding it out to Heechul. The bottles clink together as Heechul stuffs them in his purse.

They share a rebellious grin. Heechul decides he doesn’t hate Younghoon after all.

***

They keep walking until the houses start to get sparse and find a hill with a dirt path winding up it, where someone seemed to have tried building something but quickly abandoned it. There’s a pile of crumbling cinder blocks at the top, so they sit down. Heechul pulls the bottles out of his bag, then a half-empty pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Want one?” he asks, pointing the open pack toward Younghoon.

“Sure.” They each take one. Heechul lights Younghoon’s cigarette first, and their fingers brush for just a second. It’s the kind of thing a straight guy wouldn’t notice, but Younghoon does, even though he’s not sure it means anything.

The last glow of twilight faintly outlines the city, and late spring fireflies drift lazily up from the patches of wild grass and weeds around them, pinpricks of light matching their two burning cigarettes. It’s quiet on the hill, and at first they don’t break the silence, respecting the sanctity of the occasion. Neither one has to point out aloud that they don’t know how many more chances they’ll have like this, to just be a couple of teenagers out late doing something they’re not supposed to. But at the same time, as Younghoon looks out over Wonju’s sad excuse for a skyline, he knows he can’t wait to leave his childhood behind.

“What’re you gonna do after you graduate, cockwrinkle?” he asks, putting out his cigarette butt on the cinder block next to him.

“Not become an electrician, that’s for fucking sure,” Heechul replies. Younghoon lets out a single bitter laugh. They’d both ended up at the tech school because they fucked up too bad in elementary school to get into the normal high school, but had fucked up equally bad in their respective trades. “I got into college, so I guess I’ll go finally learn English. Grow my hair out. Wear whatever the fuck I want. Pick up guys on the weekend. Hell, maybe I’ll become a drag queen or a comedian or something. Could use the spare cash.” He shrugs. “You?”

“Hell if I know. Maybe I’ll just enlist right away, get it over with. Give myself a couple years to figure my life out.”

“Fuck, don’t remind me. I’m putting it off. Maybe if I wait long enough they’ll stop and I won’t have to waste two years of my life.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Younghoon doesn’t think it’s that likely, but he’s not about to say so. Instead, he just cracks open his bottle of soju. He hasn’t had a whole bottle on his own before—his parents would kill him if they caught him drunk—but they didn’t have cups, and he’s not in the mood to find out whether it’s possible to give someone the cold sores he occasionally gets by just sharing a drink. (Not to mention that his friends would never let him live it down if they noticed.) But what the hell, he thinks, he’s graduating in a couple weeks and deserves to rebel a little.

“Cheers,” Heechul says, holding out his open bottle.

“To?”

“I don’t know. To…to being gay as fuck and not giving a fuck, how about.”

“Hey, speak for yourself. Unlike you, I know how to be subtle about it.”

Heechul snorts. “Bullshit. Have you ever listened to yourself talk? And just look at how _delicately_ you’re holding that bottle cap.”

Younghoon immediately sets the cap down.

“If the heteros at our school weren’t such clueless dipshits they’d see right through both of us. I get three or four girls confessing to me a month. Fucking unbelievable.”

“There’s worse problems to have, I guess.”

“Yeah, maybe.” The way Heechul’s mouth twists says he disagrees. “Anyways.” He holds his bottle out again. Younghoon clinks the neck of his bottle against it, and they drink, letting out a real hiss this time as the liquor burns down their throats. The silence returns for a few minutes. Younghoon picks the bottle cap back up, twisting the little strip of metal that kept it sealed shut.

“Have you…I mean, do your parents know?” he asks finally, twirling the bottle cap’s stem between his fingers.

“Yeah. For a while now.” Younghoon is surprised by how casually Heechul can say this. “It’s my own damn fault. I kissed a guy for the first time in sixth grade and thought it’d be a good idea to write about it in my school journal. My mom saw it, obviously. I don’t know what she did, but she must have said something to the teacher so I wouldn’t get in trouble.”

“Was she mad?”

“She just didn’t get it at first. Thought it was a phase. Tried to talk me out of it occasionally. My dad seemed disappointed that I wasn’t ever going to grow up to be ‘manly’. But, I mean, we’re all atheists, so what was there really for them to be mad about? They couldn’t use the sky fairy’s disapproval as an excuse. Nowadays they mostly leave me alone about it. I cause enough other trouble for them to worry about anyway.”

Younghoon stares down into the bottle cap in his hands, not responding. He can’t imagine telling his parents. Not until he’s out of the house—and maybe not even then. Heechul doesn’t ask.

“What if we just left?” Younghoon asks. “Just went to the train station and got on the last train to Seoul?” It sounds out of the blue, but it’s not really.

“Yeah. We could go to Itaewon. I bet I could charm a bouncer into letting us into a bar.”

“Who’d be able to stop us? We’ve got money.”

“Yeah.” But neither moves, except to take another pull or two at their bottles of soju. Even Heechul with all his bravado must have a limit somewhere.

“You know, pissbag, I’m starting to think this whole rivalry thing was a load of crap. Think of what we could have done if we’d just joined forces from the beginning,” Heechul says. “Now it’s too late.”

“I feel like high school’s like that for everyone, a little bit. What are you going to do about it?” The lights of the fireflies are starting to blur together with the lights of the city. Younghoon wonders idly if he’s drunk but in some corner of his mind notices that his bottle is less empty than Heechul’s. “But hey, nobody says you have to fall off the face of the earth when you graduate. We could have another chance.”

Heechul smirks. “Is that you trying to ask for a second date?”

“Did you want it to be?” Younghoon fires back, not sure what answer he’d prefer.

“Well, since you asked. Sure. Why not. Break up the boredom of vacation a little.”

Younghoon takes a drink, looking away to cover his blush. That was unexpected. He hasn’t actually been on that many dates, though of course that’s not what everyone else thinks. He hopes Heechul won’t catch on that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. How difficult can it be, right?

When he looks back, Heechul is staring at him with uncomfortable intensity. Younghoon tugs on his collar and glances to either side. Is he breaking some kind of social code here that he doesn’t know about? Heechul’s stare doesn’t waver, though he’s swaying slightly. Or maybe that’s Younghoon. It’s hard to tell.

Something is definitely wrong, Younghoon decides. Not sure what else to do, he aims for a cool slight lean in Heechul’s direction, loses his balance, and narrowly avoids smashing Heechul’s hand as he catches himself. He slides his fingertips between Heechul’s and pretends it was intentional. (Heechul isn’t clear on how things escalated so quickly, but you won’t catch him complaining.)

It’s a small miracle that they don’t miss each other’s mouths.

Younghoon decides based on Heechul’s reaction that this was what he was supposed to do after all. And something just feels right about Heechul’s full, soft lips moving against his—for about five seconds, that is, until out of nowhere Heechul just bites him. Younghoon’s so surprised he pulls back instinctively, then coughs to cover it.

“You’ve got fish breath,” he mutters. “Assmonkey.”

“We literally ate the same thing, dipshit. And it looks like you’re too drunk to come up with good insults.”

The mention of breath shakes Younghoon’s memory clear. “Fuck,” he says. “I need to get home. My parents are going to kill me if they find out.”

“Let’s go, then. Wouldn’t want widdle baby to miss bedtime.” Heechul drains the last sip of his bottle of soju, apparently oblivious to the awkward atmosphere or his role in creating it. Younghoon decides he’s had enough to drink and discreetly caps his bottle before slipping it back into the bag. Struggling to clear his head, he makes his way down the hill, Heechul trailing after with another cigarette in his hand.

***

Heechul sings trot the whole way back.

“I like traditional music,” he says.

“Trot isn’t traditional.”

“Shut up.”

Younghoon feels a headache coming on in both the literal and figurative senses, a throbbing lesson in the hazards of alcohol. (If he can remember it in the morning, that is.)

***

It’s the day after graduation when Younghoon realizes he forgot to get Heechul’s number. They didn’t even run into each other with all the busyness of finals, and their departments had separate ceremonies. Well, Heechul was kind of weird anyways. Hot—he’ll admit to that—but weird. There’ll be other hot guys later. He doesn’t think too much about it.

Heechul wakes up the next morning with a cold sore and is bitter about it for the next three months. He considers chasing Younghoon down and confronting him about it, but decides it’s beneath him. Better to just let this go. Younghoon was hot, sure—it turns out Heechul likes facial hair—but was there anything special about him? Probably not. Heechul figures he can do better.

***

And yet, once in a while, drinking alone on a hot summer night and watching the city fall asleep, nostalgia will wash over him and he’ll wonder.


End file.
